Yesterday I posed the question: “If God approached humanity through the Word made flesh, is it possible to consider that God’s continuing revelation is Christ’s historical body made concrete in the church?
I was surprised to see how thoroughly Bonhoeffer had explored this issue in his earlier works, The Communion of the Saints and Act and Being.
For Bonhoeffer, the issue is revelation. If the fulfillment of life is to be in communion with God, then the question is how do we come to know God? If we try to come to know God through our own efforts, we are trapped in our own consciousness and all ideas about God become projections. God becomes the Man Upstairs or some other reflection of the highest ideals of the characteristics of humanity.
J.B. Phillips, many years ago, catalogued the many ways we reduce God to human projections of our fears or desires in his book Your God is Too Small. God becomes Santa Claus, the policeman, the judge, etc. Such human projections are inadequate and ambiguous at best. God is more than the sense of awe evoked by a star-filled night. That same star-filled night might be the cause of anguish for a farmer who desperately needs rain for his crops or an added sense of horror to a child lost in the woods. God is more than the watchful lifeguard who rescues us when we have foolishly gotten in over our heads. God is more than the voice of conscience which varies so much from one human to the next that the result could only be polytheism. No matter how we attempt to purify our thoughts and reach out to encounter the true God, we are still trapped in our own limitations.
Even if we were able to hear the best ideas ever about God, we would still be the ones judging the correctness or incorrectness of those ideas. We would be the god at the center of our own personal universe determining, for good or evil, the object of our faith.
How can we get totally outside our experiences, fears and desires and come to know the one true God? Because the God of Scripture is holy other, completely outside of ourselves, we have to have another source of our knowledge of God other than our own projections. We can only come to know God as God comes to us. God comes to us not as an idea we can debate or an object that we can manipulate but rather as an act. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
